Thursday, 3 December 2015

A Terrestrial Religion

"We see a resurgent Islam and wonder how to deal with it - and start by witlessly taking for granted that the proper article is 'a,' that there is just one Muslim world and they're all a bunch of Arabs."
-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 182-206 AT pp. 193-194.

No religion is a single group with a single purpose throughout history. Religious institutions survive social changes by changing their base of support. Thus, in different historical periods, mosques and imams have been funded by: